About Moya
by TheLionOfLannister
Summary: A collection of disconnected oneshots, taking a closer look at various pairings and situations aboard Moya.
1. Slip

So here's the deal. I loved this show. I _loved _this show. I just finished it about a month back, and that's all there really is to say about it. And the further I got, the more ideas I had to write about. I'd planned out over fifteen oneshots when I decided that it would be best to just... put them all together, in one place, in one multi-chapter story.

So I'll be writing a lot of these, and they will show up as chapters following this one – I already have a few more almost finished. They aren't connected, they aren't in order, and they are mostly off-camera type moments, or closer looks at moments that _are _on camera. John/Aeryn will be the primary focus, but I'll be exploring all the other canon pairings as well, and writing from pretty much every character's perspective over time. The timeline in this one is pretty vague for the first half, but it takes place after Human Reaction and leads up to the end of Season of Death.

So thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy this first entry. Reviews would be very, very much appreciated.

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><p><strong>'SLIP'<strong>

(About slipping; because Crichton is immature and naïve and stupid and talks too much, but she loves him anyway )

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><p>Looking back, Aeryn isn't certain where exactly it all began.<p>

There are a dozen possibilities, gathered together and sorted out and blurring slightly at the edges in her mind. Moments in time and the hitch of his smile, the slight way he tilts his head when he doesn't understand something, the unending references to places she's never been and things she's never seen.

The first time she kissed him, fire igniting at the narrow precipice between life and death, and the white-hot echo it left in its wake.

The night under a gathering storm on what wasn't Earth, gentle hands and the heat of his mouth pressing to the crook of her neck and the echo of rain's dampness on their skin – desperation that should have been there replaced by a resignation-laced need to connect.

She isn't sure. It doesn't matter. The only thing she knows for certain is that he has destroyed everything she has ever had and razed every belief the Peacekeepers ever implanted and worked his way past every defense meant to keep him out.

And she is definitely in too deep.

-N-

At first, he is _frustrating –_ foolish and lacking all discipline, and so far from the Peacekeeper men she's used to that the contrasts eclipse just about everything else.

Somewhere along the way there is a swampy planet with very little sunlight, and a dark cave where he pulls her back to hide against a well and hushes her as they listen to the rattle of pulse pistols outside in the gloom.

"Your plans never work, you know," Aeryn tells him in little more than a snarled whisper, shoving his hand off of her arm but still leaning her head back against his chest and counting his quickened heartbeats as the wait drags on. John shifts immediately at the remark, tensing in what she anticipates as indignation – she isn't disappointed.

"Wait, wait, wait," he says, twisting his head around until he can give her the corner of a scowl, "Now this is _my _fault?"

"It was always your fault, Crichton," she replies easily, eyes flicking up to meet his, and one brow arching in an almost-challenge. "It usually is."

"Right. Because your plans are always so much better. Hey, if it weren't for me, most of you would be dead_,_" he says archly, with the barest pull of a smile lingering near the very corner of his mouth. "My plans _always _work." At the look she gives him, he amends reluctantly, "Okay, fine. They _usually _work."

"After they fail no fewer than three or four times," Aeryn grumbles back, crossing her arms loosely over her chest and exhaling. Sweat has gathered at her hairline, as the planet's natural humidity works its way past her clothing. "I'm going to be pulling shrapnel out of my prowler for at least the next _cycle, _you know."

"Assuming we make it out of here," he retorts. Then, shrewdly, with a slight raise of one brow, "Hey, you know, this could count as a near-death experience. If you wanted to-..."

"Don't get any ideas," she says, cutting him off (but she's smirking now, too). "Or it'll be much closer to a near-death experience for you."

His only response is the slightest rumbling of his chest behind her as he laughs, and they don't talk anymore after that.

-N-

At first, his weaknesses are only a hindrance; a snag on which everything catches and a piece out of place that she just cannot set right.

His eyesight is poor and his reflexes are slow, and he's a decent shot with a pulse pistol but he's not particularly strong. Emotions reign over reason and plans are cobbled together from fantastical ideas and wishful thinking and that _infuriating _eternal optimism he always seems to have at hand.

These things become familiar to her quickly, and she learns to compensate – matching weakness with strength, emotion with reason. A mesh that proves more than formidable, to her surprise. He is separated from his home and she is an outcast from hers, and she thinks, maybe this is why they work together so well (when by all rights they shouldn't).

Somewhere along the way she is showing him how to disassemble and reassemble a pulse rifle, and he says, "You know, I _am _learning, Aeryn."

And she only blinks at him. "I know you are. You're learning _slowly, _but you are learning."

And that seems to take him just the slightest bit off guard. "Oh. Right," he replies, the familiar uncertain furrow springing up between his brows. And with more assurance: "Exactly." And with a tentative look at her: "It'll get easier. Right?"

She shrugs. "Perhaps. I can't answer that with any accuracy – it's a question of just what your capacity for learning really is."

John apparently does not appreciate the answer, because he scowls at her and sets the pieces of the rifle down and crosses his arms indignantly over his chest.

Aeryn stares back, uncomprehending. "What? I'm just being honest, Crichton."

"You couldn't just... I don' know... _lie _to me, Aeryn? Pull out a good old-fashioned, 'Of course you will, John'?"

And he's been tolerable as of late, so she sighs and forces her expression into neutral - "Very well," she says, and then in as cheery a voice as she can manage parrots back, "Of course you will, John."

He just looks at her. And he blinks. And he picks up the pieces of the rifle again, and, shoulders trembling a bit with what she eventually realizes is restrained laughter, forces out, "Alright, you know what, forget I said anything. How do you do this part again?"

-N-

At first, she does her best to ignore his fixation with Earth.

Constant references and the ever-present desire to return mark everything he does and everything he is working toward, for the first few months of their traveling together. He wants to go _home, _and she cannot ever go home, so she refuses to discuss it and shuts him out when he starts in on talking about his distant world with all its strange customs and small, green men who train heroes. She doesn't understand, and she doesn't _want _to understand, and she really does not like to think about what will happen if he does find a way back.

And then, his fixation seems to be shuffled to the background – Scorpius's pursuit and Talyn's birth and Crais's abrupt switching of sides and everything else that happens in the wake of their destruction of the Gammak Base seems to sweep everything they cared about before to the side, and John just stops talking about it; still making his references, but not constantly seeming to pine for a planet he'll probably never see again.

(Aeryn welcomes the change, though she won't tell him that.)

Somewhere along the way there is a commerce planet on which Rygel and D'Argo spend a good solar day restocking, and the rest of them take the leave time on a neighboring planet with a tempered climate and lush scenery. And, there is a beach with crashing waves and white sand that stretches on either side in rising and falling dunes to meet the clear sky; Aeryn finds John standing barefoot in the shallows of the water, as it washes in around his mid-calf.

"You seem to like this planet," she observes, approaching, her hands loosely crossing over her chest as she stares down at the flurries of sand stirred up by the waves and the occasional tiny shell turned over and over in the current.

"Yeah, well..." John turns to grin at her, the sunlight catching on lingering droplets of water suspended in his hair. "It's nice. Reminds me of Earth." He pauses, nods pointedly at the combat boots she's wearing, and adds as almost an afterthought, "You should take your shoes off."

"No," she objects obstinately, but she does step closer, till she's standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the surf. Then: "You have places like this on Earth?"

"Yup," John nods, staring back out at the distant point where the sea seemed to meet the sky. "Beaches. Like the one where you crashed, back on... Not-Earth."

"Oh," she says.

John's shoulders rise and fall as he takes a breath. "We'd go when I was a kid, in the summer. A vacation. If my dad was home. We'd swim and go fishing and all that, typical vacation stuff. But I remember the sandcastles the best. Me and my sister, we'd always build these... giant sandcastles. Try to outdo each other. 'Course, I was older than her, but still..." At Aeryn's blank stare, he looks at her, clarifies, "Sandcastles. Ya know. Castles built out of sand. They-..." He sighs when her expression doesn't change, dismisses it with a wave of his hand. "Never mind."

"Do they have a purpose?" she asks, squinting at him through the bright sunlight.

He looks a cross between amused and exasperated, at that. "No, they don't have a purpose, Aeryn. It was fun." His smile turns distant; distracted, as his thumbs hook in his pockets and his head tilts back towards the sky. "Sometimes, we'd try and make one that would last overnight. Build big walls around it, a moat, you know. And when – if – we came back the next morning, we'd always go check. But they never lasted. Just... smooth sand, where the tide came in. Like we were never there. But we kept trying."

Aeryn just stares at him, picking over the information word-by-word. "That seems rather pointless, John."

"Yeah, well, not everything has a point," he answers patiently, bending to scoop up a particular handful of wet sand from under the water, and sifting it through his fingers until he's holding just a rounded, pearly shell with a chip out of the edge in his palm. "Sometimes things are just fun. And we were _kids._"

"Oh," she says again.

"I could show you how to build one," Crichton adds, looking at her sidelong, and tosses the shell to her.

She catches it reflexively, squints at the pale exterior. "We aren't children, Crichton." And, holding up the shell for him to see: "I don't know what to do with this."

"Yeah, but it would be-..." John shakes his head, relenting. "Fine, Aeryn. We don't really have the stuff – shovel, buckets, things like that – to make one, anyway. At least, not a good one." He reaches out, closes her hand around the shell without a word, and she doesn't pull away from him. "Just... keep the shell, all right? Keep it. It's a... you know, a gift."

So they don't build a sandcastle. But Aeryn does tuck the shell into a pocket of her vest, and she does eventually take off her boots, tossing them back up on the shore next to John's, and he seems to want her there so she stays and lets the cool water splash against her ankles as the sun begins to set.

-N-

At first, he is just Crichton.

And, she doesn't _need _him, with a kind of razor-edged desperation founded in their own mutual displacement from the places they knew as home. And, she doesn't find herself depending on him in combat, not as a vaguely-useful accessory, but as a partner who she can trust. And, she doesn't love him.

And then one day she finds that she does.

Aeryn doesn't know much about love, but she knows this much: she would kill for him and she would die for him, and she would move the galaxy if it kept him safe – and that is her definition, the box that love fits into for her, and that is the best she can do.

She loves John Crichton.

And it's a frightening realization.

-N-

At first, she doesn't know how to deal with his apparent descent into madness.

He is slipping, slipping away, and quickly. This is not something she can ward off with guns or a desperate plan, either – not when the slip is taking place within the confinement of his mind, and not when he refuses to let any of them in to help. He has whole conversations, arguments, debates with a person who _is not there. _He fixates on his chess game with something bordering on obsession, for arns at a time. And sometimes he just sits and stares at nothing, and that is the scariest part of all.

"Are you going to be all right?" she asks him with furrowed brows from her place in a nearby chair, watching him skeptically through the shadows of his darkened room as his hand trembles waveringly over a chess piece.

He doesn't answer, for a long time. The slanted light from the hall falls in fractured patterns over his face, highlighting the lines of tension there, the dark circles underlining his eyes. And then he just looks at her, and says, "I don't know."

Aeryn says nothing. And John says nothing. He just abruptly sweeps an arm out, knocking the chess pieces over (some of them scatter across the floor). And he sets his elbows on the table and he drops his head into his hands and gives a shuddering sigh, and she doesn't think she's ever seen him look quite this vulnerable.

(She doesn't like it.)

"I meant it," he mumbles at length, muffled. "When I said that my mind was all I have left. I'm don't belong out here. I'm not... _used _to this world, like you and the others are. So this? This is it. It's all I got."

And Aeryn doesn't know quite how _this_ works – they didn't cover any of it in Peacekeeper training, of course – but it feels like the right thing to do, to look at him and say, simply, "No. It's not."

John doesn't speak, but after a pause he lets one hand drop to the table, palm up, trembling almost imperceptibly. Aeryn stares at it in confused silence, until she realizes that it _also _feels like the right thing to do to cross the short distance to the table and let her hand rest lightly in his.

He grips it tightly. And they are very, very quiet.

-N-

At first, she wouldn't have imagined that this would be her end.

A frozen lake. Death, at the hands of the man she loves, his mind stolen by some neural chip that would have stolen him from her soon anyway. The sick-empty feeling of resignation settling into it's place below her ribs. Strangely, it takes fear with it – replaced by numbness like that the water below will bring, she is certain.

Crashing through the ice, the shock of meeting frigid water, the last glimpse she gets of a stark-cold sky. And Crichton's name, a sound torn away from her on the back of a gasp, as the icy waves engulfing her tear her life away. These are the last things she knows.

And darkness, that is the end.

-N-

Afterwards, she is not sure where they stand. Or what to do. Or where to go next.

She is alive, when she shouldn't be. And Zhaan is dying, paying a price that is not hers to pay. And John is safe.

(And John is _safe.)_

He takes her face in his hands and kisses her, and it is so _right, _and his hands are warm and and the angles of his back sturdy under her fingertips as she tugs him closer, and she _loves _John Crichton. Which is why they cannot let this be. Because he's frelled up her life and her rules and now he's frelling up her judgment, and the cost for that is just too high.

But she will do everything in her power to make sure he _stays _safe.

It's simply something she has to do.

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><p>Disclaimer: This wonderful show sadly does not belong to me. I claim nothing.<p> 


	2. Theft

Thanks so much for the reviews, you guys. It means a lot. Future chapters _should _come a bit quicker than this one – I was not anticipating my laptop suddenly ceasing to function, thus robbing me of everything I'd gotten done on this chapter. But. Such is life.

So here is installment number two. In which I crank up the sentimentality, because let's be honest, Crichton is a sentimental kind of guy. Also, adorable. Next chapter will have, ya know, other characters and the like, but I'm still getting a feel for this, so I'm keeping it simple for this one.

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><p>"<strong>THEFT"<strong>

**(About stealing more than just a journal and a gun)**

The whole thing feels just a bit too much like stealing, though John really doesn't think it _should;_ these are his belongings, after all, the clothes and the journal and the pulse pistol.

Sort of.

(It isn't like there is a _book _that covers this, 'Being Duplicated for Dummies' or something like it, so he's basically on his own here)

But there is no mistaking the feeling of guilt that nags at him, afterward, when he is standing on Talyn and staring into the empty and eternal patch of space he approximates Moya to have occupied just microts before their seamless starburst. The bag on his shoulder is heavy enough to be an unyielding reminder of what he took, the worn strap pressing on his collarbone, and he digs the heels of his hands into his eyes and groans wearily against the driving headache that has taken up residence within his skull.

Aeryn says, at his shoulder and stony-faced as he's seen her, "I don't think we'll be going back anytime soon."

John shifts uncomfortably, whether out from under her demanding stare or the bag on his shoulder, he's not sure. He drags a lazy hand up the curving arch that runs over the viewport they're looking out and fixates on a distant star, passively imagines the swirl of a wormhole's azure tones against the backdrop of eternity.

It's easier to ignore the _distance _between them if he isn't looking at her, and if he isn't thinking about it, but he can't say that so he just says, "I know."

"You didn't have to come with me," she clarifies, and she apparently has no qualms about looking at _him, _because her eyes are fixed on him and she is not going anywhere.

He throws her a sidelong look, regrets it, as she catches and holds his stare with the unyielding kind of determination he knows he can't work around. So. No deflections, here. "Well, I couldn't stay _there,_" he gets out, before he has a handle on his own words, and rambles on, "One ship's not big enough for two of me. And anyway, someone's gotta keep an eye on our fearless leader, right? Make sure he doesn't go all... 'Captain Ahab' on the rest of us."

And Aeryn is unimpressed, apparently, because she looks at him just a moment longer and then abruptly says, "I need to assist Crais. You should find your quarters."

"Right," he mutters, and curls a hand around his duffel bag's strap with a grimace. "This is going to go _great._"

-n-

And, it goes about as well as he'd hoped for; the contrasts between Talyn and his mother are far more violently stark than John could have possibly anticipated, and the others seem to take it in stride, but he struggles. Talyn is _sharp; _angles and crispness and harsh crimson to eclipse the stars, blackness to melt into space.

Always on edge, an unmistakable agitation in the almost-quiver John can sometimes almost sense at the very edges of sensation.

It is the clash of his spark-turned-wildfire adolescence and Crais's level will, and John sometimes wonders how any of them ever manage to sleep at all, in this place.

-n-

_John_ certainly doesn't sleep; and somewhere along the way he wakes up tangled in his blankets, gasping and soaked with sweat as he tries to clear the lingering fragments of some nightmare. Wormholes and Scorpius and Zhaan and a distant ice planet and _wormholes, _intertwined too deeply to tell where one ended and another began. And he knows he won't sleep anymore after _that_, so he wipes dampness from his hairline and grabs his journal and goes for a walk, bare feet padding on the cold floor and arms swinging loosely by his sides.

Until he comes across Aeryn, and _she _isn't sleeping either, but is just sitting there in an alcove on the floor, curled into the natural slope of the wall and leaning her head against its side. John peers at her, the angles of her face framed by hair loosed from its usual braid, worry-dark eyes highlighted with telling circles. Not sleeping.

He says, "Hey."

Aeryn glances up, brows tilting upward slightly as her eyes sweep over his lack of shirt, messy hair, the journal dangling uselessly from his hand. "You should be sleeping," she says by way of greeting, warily. "What are you doing up?"

John shifts his weight (because _damn, _these floors are _cold_) and fiddles with a page of his journal, sweat-dampened fingertips smearing ink, crinkling paper."I could ask you the same thing." Then he drops to the floor, scoots as close as he dares, and closer when she doesn't protest. "Anyway, I couldn't sleep. Guess I'm homesick."

She looks at him askance, doubtful. "Homesick?"

John shivers and pulls his knees to his chest, wraps his arms around them. He thinks about bringing up the nightmare – _ice breaking and a wormhole's spiral edge pulling Zhaan away from them, into nothing. _And then he doesn't. Just: "Yeah, you know. This is like... going to college all over again. Except instead of a dorm, I get an adolescent ship who _hates _me." He pauses. "And the food still sucks."

Aeryn eyes him sidelong, seeming to sort through and discard the unfamiliar references, as she always does. "So you miss Moya, then," she eventually concludes, and her head does that slight tilting thing, something between analysis and fascination. "We all do."

"Yeah... but at least Talyn _likes_ you." John exhales unhappily, bends a knee up and folds forward to rest his chin on it. "So does Crais."

The subtext is apparently not lost on Aeryn – she sighs, distant and very distinctly Not Looking at Him. "All right, John."

And if he was thinking clearly he would have taken the hint, left her alone and gone back to bed; but it's late and he's tired and _not _thinking clearly, so instead he inches even closer and tilts his head down and looks up at her through his eyelashes in his most convincing puppy dog expression (and it's just too bad she doesn't know what a puppy is; he tried describing it once, and didn't get very far).

"It's cold," he tells her, and apparently this isn't working because Aeryn looks at him like he's suddenly grown another head, instead of, oh, letting him put an arm around her and pull her close and pretend that they _haven't_ been avoiding each other since Zhaan's death or before.

"Yes," she agrees. "Talyn's optimum temperature is several degrees below Moya's, I've told you this. No doubt a Peacekeeper design – Sebaceans don't like the heat, you know."

"Right," John mutters, and retreats with a relenting grimace. "Of course they don't."

But. She doesn't make him leave; and she does lean into him just the slightest bit, until their shoulders are touching. And John scribbles down star maps while she watches with a skeptical expression, the sleep cycle dragging ever on.

-n-

And, then they fix things.

And John thinks, he always _knew _they would, somehow – because that's just how it's supposed to be, and because the chilled distance couldn't last forever. It just wouldn't be _fair. _

It's not theft, though; he is here and the other him is not, he reminds himself, again and again. Drowning his doubts in reason, his misgivings in the _rightness _of this.

They combine quarters because it makes sense; Talyn doesn't have enough room for all of them anyway, so Aeryn justifies it as a space issue and John certainly doesn't mind – Crais's lips press together unhappily when he's made aware of the new arrangements, and John doesn't mind that so much, either.

But it isn't about space.

Sleep cycles are a funny thing on ships, almost-irrelevant where there is no night and there is no day, but it feels a great deal like night when she curls into him under the wash of glittering stars and leans her head back against his chest. The distance is gone from it all, and she is _there _again, loosening up around him and relaxing more, and there isn't an ounce of tension in her when he trails a hand down her arm to tangle his fingers with hers.

She turns her face up towards his, a tentative smile framed by unruly hair tumbling free of the usual braid, and it is undeniably an invitation; he leans in to kiss her lingeringly, and they do not need to say anything at all.

-n-

"You know," Aeryn says one morning, doing a routine maintenance check while John trails ineffectively behind her and tosses his pen from hand to hand, "things are going to be complicated when we reunite with Moya."

When. Not if. The choice of words is not lost on John, sparking in its wake a whetted combination of apprehension and anticipation (and the two weave together until he can no longer really distinguish between them). A frown pulls unhappily across his mouth, and he leans on a section of wall and drums a staccato rhythm against it absently with the cap of the pen until he can think of something to say. "Yeah... that's kind of the elephant in the room right now, isn't it?"

And Aeryn stops in her work, fingertips freezing in midair over some conduit. "The _what_?"

He waves a hand, dismissive, shaking away the irrelevant reference before she can do it for him. "Never mind. It means, it's the thing we don't want to talk about."

She resumes her work as easily as she stopped, a natural fluency to it that John has never been able to pin down – whether it's her natural connection with Talyn or her proficiency with Leviathans since she was unwillingly granted Pilot's DNA or some combination of the two. And without looking up she adds, "You're the one who's been avoiding the subject, Crichton, not me."

"Yeah, well..." he slouches over to stand behind her, surly, and tilts his chin to rest against the top of her head, arms slipping around her and hands interlacing a bit above her waist. "You're right. I don't want to talk about it."

"Hiding from the issue won't solve anything," Aeryn informs him without much inflection, but she does twist around to look at him for the stuttering length of a doubt-tinged moment, draws a hand lightly down the side of his jaw and fleetingly brushes her lips over his before pulling away and taking off down the hall. John leans into the touch; into the empty air, when it's gone.

Then he laughs, more sharp than amused. "Yeah, well, hiding's worked well enough for me so far." And when she pauses a half-dozen paces away to glance back, an annoyed look curving over her expression: "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, Aeryn."

-n-

For a while, it's fine. Better than fine. Things are so right, so perfect; but perfect never, ever lasts, for them – as quickly as they are _happy _something happens, and he wonders, would it _kill _the universe to let them have ten microts of peace?

Apparently it would. Because he cannot trace the edges of what unfolds, too much chaos, too much loss. There is just the final blow, Aeryn crumpling against him with a strangled sound that cuts through to the bone as he pulls her against him and promises her, promises himself, he'll _nevernevernever _let go.

Drowned out, almost, as the snap of a gunshot that stole her mother's life echoes in the oppressively thick jungle.

But. It's okay_. _Because, theyare okay. And everything is going to be okay.

John tells her that, insistent, and she seems to at least want to believe him; not so very doubtful or dismissive, and not discouraging him. He has a nagging feeling that she wantsto hear it, because she is calculating and cool and tough as anything and he's pretty sure she could take on the universe if it came down to it. But sometimes, he decides, people just need to hear that everything is going to be all right.

So he tells her, after, back on Talyn and standing behind her at a viewport, arms going around her waist and lips resting on the smooth skin of her neck. Catching her slight shiver, pressing against tension. It's going to be fine. If he says it over and over, drowns this in words, it might be enough.

He's good at that, good at this.

-n-

And then, it's not longer all right, because he is dying.

Though John thinks it cruelly fitting, that what started with wormholes is ending with them; full-circle, everything coming full-circle, or maybe the universe just can't have two John Crichtons in it. Maybe one of them just had to die.

He's not in much pain, now; not yet, or maybe not ever, and maybe this will kill him quietly. He doesn't know; can't bring himself to think too much about it, because there is still a mission to complete, still a dreadnought on the way and a weapon he has to use in Jack's stead. No time for dying right now. No, death, he _doesn't _have an opening in his schedule right now, but maybe if you call back tomorrow…?

_Heh._

It's not funny, not funny at all, shouldn't be funny.

Damned wormholes. They should bury him in one when this is over, let them have him, if they want him so very badly.

He scrapes at crusting sand on his jacket with an idle fingernail on the ride back, wonders what kind of funeral will be held; stupid, but it nags at him, creeps up in between wormholes and _doom_ in his thoughts. He remembers Aeryn's funeral (tries not to, but does); and maybe it will be like that, human enough in its own way.

He really doesn't want to die like this.

Aeryn eyes him, tilts her head as her expert hands maneuver jerky controls flawlessly, pulling their vehicle into the hanger. "Are you sure you're all right, John?"

John glances sidelong at her, tries to brand everything into his memory, the shape of her mouth and the curve of her jaw and the exact tones of color in her eyes, so that maybe, maybe he can carry it into eternity with him. Stupid, stupid. But necessary.

"Yeah," he says. "I'm great."

-n-

He sits along in his quarters for a short time, before it's all over, because he will have people with him when he goes but he just needs half a minute to _think_. Think about… well.

Dying.

The abhorrent word stings behind his eyes, sparks of crimson like blood.

He wants to do a lot of things. Draw up one last star chart. Write letters to everyone he cares about on Moya. Pack up, put his things back into the scuffed-up duffel bag for the other him so that Aeryn doesn't have to do it.

Instead, he records a message.

He keeps it brief. Even. Tells the other him what he needs to know, about wormholes, Ancients, Scarrans, weapons, _wormholes. _About what he will have to do.

About Aeryn.

Everything he has here – his pulse pistol, his journal, and _her – _he stole, a theft both innocent and selfish, but now he is returning it. Things coming full circle, and soon, there will only be one John Crichton in the universe. Maybe there's only space for one. Maybe he was always doomed to die.

The room echoes with resounding silence when he's done, and the last calling card he left for the Scarrans (his weapon, or Jack's weapon, or does it even matter?) rings lingeringly in his ears. The requiem for his fading life, mournful and almost sweet, fading into the blackness of eternity.

Aeryn returns to find him there as they'd agreed, loops her arms around him with an attempt at a smile and presses her face into the junction of his neck and shoulder, and breathes.

"This isn't fair," she murmurs knife-edged against him, almost inaudible, as she helps him lie back against the pillows. Nestles close, closer, a hand resting soft against his stomach. He feels her shiver, or maybe it's just him, or maybe it doesn't matter.

He wants to tell her, promise her, _it will be all right._

Instead he just says, "I know."

-n-

His vision is failing him by the time the others say their goodbyes; blackness and sparking lights having filled in for clear vision, and dark shapes making up the figures of the people around him. But the numbness is much worse; taking the place of sensation in his fingertips, his feet, and spreading rapidly – like a twisted disease, this unfeeling, up through his calves and his forearms, and soon he will feel nothing at all.

(But he still doesn't hurt, much; a clenching bit of a headache, maybe, and something like liquid heat in his veins, and he can't tell what is real and what is a figment of his imagination, coloring in gaps that he feels are out of place in _dying.)_

Aeryn is with him at the end, one hand gripping his (he can only barely feel that, but he snatches up the ghost of sensation and winds himself around it and does not let go) and the other tracing down his jawline. They don't talk about the other him – or about theft, or Moya, or what she will do when she gets there.

Instead, she just says, "I love you, so much."

(And suddenly he doesn't hurt at all.)


End file.
